Friday, June 3, 2011

Back home, big three litre bottles of orange juice were a regular part of my weekly shop. Vietnam is full of mountains of fresh wonderful fruit, and you can get super delicious fresh fruit shakes and smoothies at almost every cafe in the country. But you can't buy 100% pure orange juice in the supermarkets. Sometimes, for a relatively expensive price you can buy juices from America or the Philippines in tetrapak cartons. They are always full of sugar and often made up from concentrate so I never bother. I bought a squeezer instead.

Today I bought a big pile of oranges and brought them home to make juice. Oranges in Vietnam all have green skins. Nellie in her blog Head (South) East wrote about this recently - she explains that the green skin is due to the tropical climate.

It's a little confusing because our first instinct on looking at a green orange is that it mustn't be ripe yet - but they are ripe, and very very sweet and juicy.

The skins on these ones were very thin and perfect for squeezing. I think these oranges were about 10% skin, 10% pip and 5% pulp - leaving a whopping 75% of pure nectar. If you tried to peel it and eat it with your fingers you'd end up with juice dripping off your elbows.

Out of that pile of oranges I got exactly one litre and one mouthful of juice. Tomorrow's breakfast!

The hardest part is not the squeezing. It's actually buying the oranges. They're heavy, and you need a lot, and you know what the supermarket is like. But I think it is worth it, occasionally, as a treat.